CIFEC students discover opportunities at careers fair

By Christopher Tobutt

Every year, the Cayman Islands Further Education Centre (CIFEC) invites many different sectors of Cayman industry to meet with their students for their annual careers fair, held in JGHS Arts Centre. There were representatives from the dive and watersports industries, hotels, supermarkets and more, so that all the young people had a good idea of the opportunities that were available to them as they looked for a career.

“We are explaining what Red Sail has to offer,” said Nicci Paul of Red Sail Sports, “We are telling all the CIFEC students about our different departments. We’ve definitely had a lot of interest in the Beach Assistant position so some of the questions we were answering about the jet skis and the wave runners– how they would be dealing with customers. We have a few different roles we have beach assistant, dive shop attendant, retail assistant too for our retail stores.”

Alex, Rachael and Stephen were representing the Ritz-Carlton hotel: “We think it is very important to inform the students about is how diverse hospitality is as an industry,” said Alex. “We’ve seen a lot of students come in and say “I’m not really interested in hospitality,” then we’ll ask them what they’re interested in and they’ll say, “I’m interested in engineering or I’m interested in IT, “and those are both things that we offer because we have a huge engineering and a huge IT department at the Ritz-Carlton. It’s such a huge property we have an entire finance and accounting department, and we have a special events department that you will very rarely see but there is a huge amount of planning that goes into our events.

Foster’s Human Resources Manager Stephanie Whyte said “we are talking to the young students about the work experience programmes that we have.  Fosters have a lot of opportunities that people don’t tend to think about.  People think about the supermarket industry in terms of the merchandising and the cashier and yes that is a very important position entry level positions but from there you can really grow in the Organisation and there are career paths that we have we allow out leadership team and we have supervisors and managers in various different parts including the supermarket the IT department, the accounting department and a lot of times our leadership team is created from the entry level positions that we have.”

CIFEC student Serita Welcome, 15, said, “I really like to do marketing and working in the business department I am really good at graphics and stuff like that so I was mostly looking into the marketing department. I’m really good at composing documents like memorandums, verbatims. I’m in creative media now so I am doing videomaking because that is my weak spot.”

Wendy Dandy Education Programmes Officer at Cayman Turtle Centre said, “Today we are showing kids that the Centre is a quite diverse institute where we have a lot of different compartments under one roof from admin animal care, tour guides, lifeguards, there are a lot of kids who are interested in animal science who come along and learn more about the Turtle Centre.

CiFEC student Dennis Waugh said, “I am looking for the role of tour guide at the Cayman Turtle Centre. The reason why I am looking for this role is it really interests me and I think I would excel in it.”